It was recent enough and not really adding anything new here at HN - that's not intended as disparaging, but the underlying content is essentially the same.
Not a dupe, agree, but a bit redundant, or at least worth flagging as recently covered.
Also https://gtoolkit.com/ is kinda if you squint a similar idea though apparently with lots of pieces to help make writing the visualizers never take more then a few moments (or so they claim)
This is really neat .. I've spent the last few days wiring up Gource to CANOpen so I can visualise CAN nodes communicating with each other, but I think I'm going to abandon this effort and try to get VSCode set up to do the same thing with this plugin ..
Getting visualizations for real-world data-structures is hard -- once you go past toy examples, GraphViz (or anything else I've seen) gets pretty unusable.
I've used GraphViz to render the relationships between three layers of data structures in a system integration (system A, wire format, system B). I had to reconfigure the layout engine to sort the structures into ranks, and lock their spacing far enough apart to make room for the dozens of edges between nodes. I also used the pseudo-HTML node layout syntax, and spent some time working on styles and a color scheme.
So it wasn't automatic, but the resulting diagrams were beautiful, illustrative, and informative. Before that nobody on the team had fully acknowledged the complexity of what we were undertaking. I showed, with the help of GraphVis, both that this was a complex integration, and that it was possible to untangle the complexity.
Imo data without structure is meaningless. This tool tries to understand what structure the data represents and provides several visualizations for the data.
But yeah, the blog post didn't really cover that, which does not mean the extension cannot do it.
